Here’s my recent opinion piece for Mobile Marketer Daily (they also ran it in Luxury Daily and Mobile Commerce Daily). I took the opportunity to look at the evolving state of mobile advertising and user experience. Consumers hate the experience, brands wish the formats served them better, and publishers are largely dissatisfied with their revenue from mobile traffic. Let’s face it, it’s been a pretty crappy for a long time and we can – and must – do better. This is especially true as more consumers employ ad blockers. I believe we can do better by focusing on formats that don’t interrupt less and are more relevant by being better personalized than they typically are today.

We just launched our PageGrabber X product at Undertone. It’s a big upgrade to our PageGrabber high-impact desktop unit we launched in 2010. Built in HTML5, PageGrabber X serves on all devices from a single creative build. It dynamically changes size, features, and functionality to deliver an optimum experience across each device. And the ad experience is enhanced with our suite of creative features that can be tailored to each device, including video, photo galleries, animations, sliders, social media integrations (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), click-to-call functionality, and countdown clocks.

PageGrabber X (or PGX as we’ve been calling it at the office) is our second proprietary responsive high impact unit following ScreenShift which we launched last June. ScreenShift has been hugely successful for Undertone, and the early response to PageGrabber X has been extraordinary out of the gate. Clients have always been excited about PageGrabber and are eager to take this experience across screens. Boom.

For years, I’ve been saying that battery life is the Achilles heal of mobile computing. This has largely been true as device features and capabilities have accelerated faster than the battery technologies that make them all work. This is a problem we all can relate to.

The truth is, a variety of inexorably-linked factors have have combined to challenge our batteries:

The daily time spend on our mobile devices has increased dramatically

Device displays have gotten bigger, brighter and higher in resolution

Increased adoption of activities that use the screen, faster and more power-hungry device processors, the cellular antenna and more. These activities include use of the browser, email, apps, games, downloads, video streaming, music playback, etc. And don’t forget phone calls, despite the fact that users are using more data and less voice than ever before.

This combination of increased sessions time and overall daily use of battery-intensive activities has us all competing for access to the nearest a/c outlet at the airport, business conference bar or you name it.

I’m hoping that battery technology will evolve faster than it has. Our daily use of our mobile devices is still increasing and the arms race for increased speed and screen brightness/resolution shows no sign of abating. Either the devices will have to become much more power efficient or battery tech will have to improve dramatically. Ideally, both will improve.

Many have pointed to hydrogen cell batteries as the solution for mobile device power. Here’s a link to an interesting piece on Gigaom about 13 Battery Startups to Watch in 2013. Some of these are focused on the larger scale applications (power grid, electric cars) while others are focused on portable applications. I hope there are some winners in here.